There is something telling about a theatre company that refuses to have a theatre. KIRILL & FRIENDS, the collective founded in Berlin in 2023 by Kirill Serebrennikov, operates nomadically — staging work in opera houses, churches, cinemas, public spaces — as if permanence itself were a constraint to be shed. This September, that restlessness crystallises into something more deliberate: a ten-day festival spread across the city, from Komische Oper Berlin @ Schillertheater to Deutsches Theater to St. Matthäuskirche to a multiplex at Alexanderplatz. The inaugural KIRILL & FRIENDS BERLIN FESTIVAL is not just a programme. It is a proposition about what a festival can be when the director behind it has spent his entire career refusing to stay in one place.

Serebrennikov's biography reads like a series of border crossings — disciplinary, geographical, political. Born in Rostov-on-Don, he became a director who moves between theatre, opera, film, ballet, and exhibition-making with an ease that suggests he sees them less as separate disciplines than as different pressures applied to the same material. Then came the years that transformed him from notable European director to something more charged: his detention in Russia, the house arrest that lasted from 2017 to 2019, the trial on embezzlement charges widely understood as politically motivated. He continued directing from confinement, sending instructions to his company at the Gogol Center in Moscow, staging work he could not see performed. When he finally left Russia and settled in Berlin, he brought with him a conviction about theatre's irreducible physicality that feels less like ideology than scar tissue.

The festival coincides with a significant institutional milestone — the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele — though the relationship between Serebrennikov's project and that anniversary reads more like strategic alignment than deep entanglement. What matters more is the timing within his own trajectory. He is currently midway through staging a new Ring Cycle at the Salzburg Easter Festival, having opened with Das Rheingold and preparing Die Walküre for the 2026/27 season. The Berlin festival arrives at a moment when Serebrennikov's international profile is arguably at its peak — no longer the persecuted dissident, not yet an establishment fixture. The in-between.

The programme is built around stage productions that have already found audiences elsewhere. LEGENDE, which opens the festival on September 4, traces the life of Sergey Parajanov, the visionary Soviet-Armenian filmmaker whose own career was shaped by state persecution. The rhyme with Serebrennikov's story is impossible to miss and presumably not meant to be: both directors faced politically motivated prosecution, both channelled maximalist visual language into a form of resistance, both refused to make their art smaller under pressure. These are described as productions "previously celebrated elsewhere" being shown in Berlin for the first time DER SCHNEESTURM, APOCALYPSE TOMORROW, and DIE TRAUER DES DÄMONS follow across the ten days, each staged at different venues. The festival also includes Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre — an opera whose absurdist, eschatological humour feels unnervingly well suited to 2026.

Beyond the stage work, the festival threads in a film programme drawing from various sections of the Cannes Film Festival — films selected for Cannes but not yet screened in Berlin, presented at CUBIX am Alexanderplatz, pulling an audience that might otherwise never cross from art-house cinema to opera and back. Two artistic workshops, developed through an international open call — one in physical theatre, one in contemporary music — will present their results publicly. The festival also reportedly includes a photography exhibition, public discussions, and a grant programme for artists who have relocated to Germany If that grant exists at the scale implied, it would be a quiet gesture toward the material realities of exile that often get elided in festival rhetoric about "international exchange."

What interests me about this festival — and what makes me slightly wary of it — is the tension between its rhetoric and its structure. Serebrennikov speaks in terms that are genuinely compelling: "Theater is an art of shared presence. Music only comes to life when it is heard here and now." He frames the festival as "a deliberate counterpoint to the digital wasteland." These are not empty phrases from a director who staged opera via written instructions from house arrest. He has earned them. But the festival is also, structurally, a showcase — a company presenting its existing repertoire across borrowed venues in a city it has chosen as home base. The question is whether that showcase generates the friction and encounter that its language promises, or whether the nomadic format is more aesthetic than substantive. Moving through theatres, churches, and cinemas creates a map of Berlin, but a map only matters if the encounters inside those buildings couldn't have happened elsewhere.

The choice of Berlin as base deserves scrutiny too. Serebrennikov describes the city as "one of the few places where it still feels possible to imagine something new — still multilingual, international, contradictory, and open." This is a version of Berlin that has been narrated so relentlessly since reunification that it sometimes functions more as brand than description. The city in 2026 is also one of rising rents, club closures, and a cultural funding landscape under genuine strain. The optimism about Berlin's openness sits uneasily alongside the material conditions facing independent artists in the city That the festival includes support for relocated artists suggests Serebrennikov is not entirely unaware of this dissonance. Whether he can do anything about it with a ten-day programme is another question.

Still, what emerges is the outline of something worth watching — not just for the individual productions, but for the model. A company without a building. A festival that occupies other people's spaces. A director who moves between Salzburg's Wagner and cinema screenings at a commercial multiplex without apparent contradiction. Whether KIRILL & FRIENDS BERLIN FESTIVAL becomes a genuinely generative annual event or a well-curated vanity project will depend on what happens in the rooms — in the shared air Serebrennikov keeps invoking. That is something no amount of processing can tell you. It requires a body in a seat, breathing the same air, which is precisely the wager he is making.